Romance in Mexico, Continuity on Lower Park

The Mexican singer José Eulogio Hernandez, known as El Potro de Sinaloa (the colt of Sinaloa), puts his husky, raspy, elegant voice in front of a traditional Sinaloense brass band, with three trumpets, clarinet, tuba and two trombones in buzzing harmony. He makes big-sounding records of a modest-sounding music. On “Sin Fronteras” (Fonovisa/Universal) he leaves behind his usual territory — drug-trade songs and stories of crazy romance — to cover more sensitive Spanish-language love songs of the last 40 years, from salsa, bachata and 1970s Latin pop, with a purview skewing toward northwestern Mexico. There are songs here written by or made popular by Roberto Carlos (“La Distancia,” “Un Gato en la Oscuridad”), Emmanuel (“Tengo Mucho Que Aprender de Ti”), Los Bukis (“Presiento Que Voy a Llorar”), and Luis Enrique (“Yo No Sé Mañana”). Though he’s rarely photographed out of Western wear, the album cover shows him in a tuxedo with an old-fashioned microphone. It’s Mr. Hernandez’s great Latino songbook set, his Rod Stewart moment. And what’s best about “Sin Fronteras” is his refusal to assume a normative sensitivity through his voice. He’s still as rough, soulful and casual as before.

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Frank KimbroughCredit
Fran Kaufman

Living by Lanterns

The Chicago jazz drummer Mike Reed was recently offered a commission to use some of Sun Ra’s audio archives in an original work. As he has written on his blog, he hesitated; he knows and cares about ’60s hard bop from Chicago but isn’t a Sun Ra fanatic. “The more interesting idea,” as he put it, clearly, unsentimentally, “was of creating new music using someone’s unfinished, unwanted and abandoned material. In my mind it doesn’t matter whose tapes these are, it’s just source material, in this case it happens to be Sun Ra.” He built a 10-piece band, Living by Lanterns, and joined forces with the vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz; they arranged some themes transcribed from a largely improvised and never released Sun Ra 1961 trio session. On the resulting record, “New Myth/Old Science” (Cuneiform), you hear little pieces of original audio: spoken voices, wheezy keyboard tones. But otherwise this is a good, semi-grooving, open-ended, new Chicago and New York band, following written themes and its own intuitive directives with good players and useful textures: Tomeka Reid’s cello, Mary Halvorson’s electric guitar and the cool, guiding chord-clangs of Mr. Adasiewicz’s vibraphone.

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Living by LanternsCredit
Lauren Deutsch

Frank Kimbrough Trio

Over two nights last summer, Jimmy Katz brought his mobile equipment down to the Kitano hotel, on lower Park Avenue, to record the pianist Frank Kimbrough’s trio, with the bassist Jay Anderson and the drummer Matt Wilson. Over the past four years or so Mr. Katz has been making a lot of live recordings, focusing on the unprocessed sound of a band in small rooms. (Among his other recent work that has made an impression on me are Bruce Barth’s “Live at Smalls” and Miles Okazaki’s “Figurations,” recorded at the Jazz Gallery.) What he got at the Kitano was a band balanced both within itself and to the dimensions of the room. And so “Live at Kitano” (Palmetto) has a slightly mysterious quality, some feeling of veracity, imperfections and all. The band knows its dynamics and its strategies, and it’s always quiet and articulate. Mr. Kimbrough has a clear and limpid sound that steals into sudden melodic runs, breaking up his stately pace, and his set lists make jazz a long continuity of meditation. The album includes Oscar Pettiford’s “Blues in the Closet,” Andrew Hill’s “Dusk,” Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose,” Paul Motian’s “Arabesque” and the standard “Lover Man,” carefully reinscribed on the fly, as if to create a polished new song.

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El Potro De SinaloaCredit
Universal Music Latin Entertainment

Andy Stott

Andy Stott is a young British techno producer who over the last three years or so has been making his music slower, murkier and better. “Luxury Problems,” his second full-length album on the Manchester label Modern Love, is radically moody, steady with beats but stingy with their sonic width, punctuated with machine noises and warm, echoed voices. It sounds as if it were being played in a deserted train terminal, where every footfall creates a 10-second echo. It crawls. You need several listens to get your head around it, to recognize the landmarks and figure out the proper speed of anticipation and delivery. Some of the voices are chop-ups of hooks, unrecognizable at different tempos, possibly from R&B or house records; but others are distinct and warm, from a soprano with classical training; those come from his former piano teacher, Alison Skidmore. When he’s working with small amounts, a little means a lot: the normal-sounding high-hat-and-snare noises in the title track, the breakbeats that run through “Up the Box.” It’s amazing how much space and emotion can be represented remotely, or electronically.

A version of this article appears in print on November 11, 2012, on page AR22 of the New York edition with the headline: Romance in Mexico, Continuity on Lower Park. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe